Watch: Newport Beach and Hurricane Rosa in “Confessions of a White Male!”

Earlier this week, Newport Beach, California, threw its jazz hands in the air at the beckoning of Hurricane Rosa, the seventh major hurricane of the 2018 season. Oh it was a big one alright, flash flooding and deaths in Mexico and the evacuation of a little town in Arizona after its damn threatened to burst.

In this short film from Jack Coleman, Benjamin Ginsberg and Alex Kilauno we see notable surfers, including the competitive grappler Joel Tudor, whose domain is usually the reefs around San Diego, stepping into Newport’s breathing tubes.

Want an incentive to get off the couch? Out of your cube? Come live the JOB way!

Did you know that Jamie O’Brien, the flame-haired star of the world’s heaviest wave (Pipeline, if you had to ask), used to have the nickname “The Little Fat Sausage”?

And that his pants used to wear out in the middle because his little pink legs would rub together?

“I wasn’t obese, just chunky,” Jamie once told me.

Orange skin. Red hair. It isn’t a recipe for popularity but as King of the Pipe Jamie says, “I have been accused of being a bit of a spitfire, so in that way, I absolutely live up to the stereotype. The red hair suits my personality.”

In this episode of Jamie’s fortnightly-ish vlog, you might get struck with a little of that ol deja vu. Watch Jamie and pals get smashed at Sandy Beach, acid drops in Waikiki and so on Yeah you seen it, but unless your heart is stone you’ll get swept up in his wet animal scent.

“People respond to the underlying message which is, let’s do stupid stuff! Let’s surf and have fun!” says Jamie. “Everyone embraces it. I have five-year-old kids coming up to me. I have people older than me coming up to me to talk about Who Is Job. I do what I do and I surf and my friends may not be the best surfers abut we have the best time. I just love it. Every day I wake up and think, this is so fucking rad, man. I just think of the stupidest things to do and get shacked.”

I think, watch.

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Griff learned to surf on very small canvases. At J-Bay he cross-stitches it like an artist.

Seven-and-a-half minutes in is the single greatest act of kindness ever seen in pro surfing!

In this fifteen-minute cut from the Colapinto brothers, we see rookie Griff as he unnerves his much older competitors at Jeffreys Bay with earth-rattling power and a style that emphasises his expressive potential.

Watch Griffin in his red wetsuit as contest footage is married to a swinging jazz track. He actually seems to be having…fun.

I think my favourite moment in the film happens when Griffin comes running out of the water mid-heat to go back up the point and the hardboiled photographer Jimmy Wilson begs to carry his board for him.

Griffin looks momentarily confused, these pro crafts weight only a few pounds afterall and he’ll have to stop and hand the board over losing a couple of seconds anyway, but being terribly polite he consents.

“Uh…sure.”

It’s a mesmerising moment.

Of course, not all pro surfers are so kind.

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The power of networking!

Wait: Is…this…the most perfect sandbottom right in the world?

Better than Mick's Snake? A Snapper minus the thugs? A Rincon minus the logs?

All these mysterious sandbottom rights! In the latest look-at-this-empty-right film, we find the Portuguese filmmaker filmmaker Diogo d’Orey and his surfer Antonio Silva carving a path to what, I suppose, is another African right point.

Empty and gorgeous as hell, even if the rip “is like a river.”

“The feeling we got was like ecstasy,” says Diogo d’Orey. “We human beings like the comfort zone. There are few people who are willing to explore, to spend money. I love doing that. I love going up the point and seeing if there’s a wave behind there. I love getting out of the madness, the popular places, the touristic places in the search for solitude.”

Not that Diogo’s claiming discovery.

“We were lucky. We had friends, we had connections who…pointed… us that way.”

A forty-second tube midway through the film speaks volumes for the power of networking.

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Dan, left, early version of Cymatic, centre, and Kelly talk volume, planing area, rail line and the miracle ingredient that gets average surfers moving.

Lennox Head shredder and shaper Daniel Thomson introduces Kelly Slater to the Cymatic…

Three months ago, BeachGrit introduced you to the Slater Designs Cymatic via the words of Stephen “Longtom” Shearer.

As he wrote at the time, “The learning curve for the Cymatic is steep, very fucking steep. But somehow it started to make sense. The hull is so sensitive, even finned as a quad that the body riding it must develop a corresponding level of relaxation and sensitivity. Any tension or inappropriate body positioning is brutally punished. You don’t push to get where you need to be, you think it and the board will go there.”

In this fifteen-minute video from 2017, we find the Lennox Head shaper Daniel Thomson introducing Kelly Slater to a surfboard prototype that would become the Cymatic. Fifteen minutes is a hell of an investment, but the natural flow of conversation that covers volume, the relative unimportance of length (in a surfboard), the placement of channels and the depth of concaves will place the surfboard-design nerd in a state of ecstasy.